Wolf seen in Stockholm

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Rare sightings of a wolf have been made in the Stockholm area over the weekend.

Ater a number of sightings on Friday and Saturday, the creature was seen again at 10 o'clock on Sunday morning in Saltsjöbaden, to the south-east of the capital.

"It must have swum over from Lännersta," Per Koziel, police station commander in Nacka, told TT.

Police saw the wolf early on Sunday morning in Skurubron, to the east of Stockholm. Two police cars followed it for a few hundred metres before the animal turned suddenly and started walking towards the cars.

"The wolf stopped just a few metres from my colleagues in their cars and looked at them for a while, before turning off the road and walking down towards Lännersta," Koziel said.

The sightings of the wolf on Friday and Saturday had been made in Vaxholm and Åkersberga, north-east of Stockholm.

Wolves are a native species in Scandinavia, but the animals are endangered, with an estimated 250 creatures in Sweden, Norway and Finland combined.

Farmers sometimes complain that wolves kill sheep and other farm animals, and a dog was killed by wolves in Värmland in early October, but it is quite rare for the creatures to be sighted so close to Sweden's major cities.

It is currently illegal to kill wolves, but the government recently proposed to allow them to be shot if they stray into a built-up area and appear threatening.

Only one incident of a person being killed by a wolf has been documented in the past forty years, when a child in India died in 1996.